August 21, 2005
@ 12:56 AM

The good folks at Google, Yahoo and MSN announced some sweet stuff for Web search aficionados this week.

  1. MSN: From the MSN Search blog post entitled Extending the MSN Search Toolbar we learn that the first of many add ins for the MSN Search toolbar is now available. The weather add in for MSN Toolbar is something I've wanted in a browser toolbar for a while. There is also information for developers interested in building their own add ins.

  2. Google: From the Google Weblog post entitled The linguasphere at large we learn that Google has launched the Google Search engine in 11 more languages bringing to total number of languages supported to 116. The coolest part of this announcement is that I can now search Google in Yoruba which is my dad's native tongue. Not bad at all.

  3. Yahoo: The last but not the least is the recent announcement about the Next Generation of Yahoo! Local on the Yahoo! Search blog. The launch showcases the integration of ratings and reviews by Yahoo! users with mapping and local information. This kind of like Yahoo! Maps meets CitySearch. Freaking awesome. Yahoo! continues to impress.

 


 

August 21, 2005
@ 12:47 AM

Yesterday I was chatting with Matt after he reviewed the paper I plan to submit for the next Bill Gates Think Week and he pointed out something that had been nagging me about using REpresentational State Transfer(REST) as a model for building distributed applications.  

In the current Wikipedia entry on REST, it states

An important concept in REST is the existence of resources (pieces of information), each of which can be referred to using a global identifier (a URL). In order to manipulate these resources, components of the network (clients and servers) communicate via a standardised interface (HTTP) and exchange representations of these resources (the actual files uploaded and downloaded) -- it is a matter of debate, however, whether the distinction between resources and their representations is too Platonic for practical use on the web, though it is popular in the RDF community.

Any number of connectors (e.g., clients, servers, caches, tunnels, etc.) can mediate the request, but each does so without "seeing past" its own request (referred to as "layering", another constraint of REST and a common principle in many other parts of information and networking architecture). Thus an application can interact with a resource by knowing two things: the identifier of the resource, and the action required -- it does not need to know whether there are caches, proxies, gateways, firewalls, tunnels, or anything else between it and the server actually holding the information. The application does, however, need to understand the format of the information (representation) returned, which is typically an HTML or XML document of some kind, although it may be an image or any other content.

Compare the above to the typical notion of service orientation such as that espoused in the article A Guide to Developing and Running Connected Systems with Indigo by Don Box where he wrote

In Indigo, a service is simply a program that one interacts with via message exchanges. A set of deployed services is a system. Individual services are built to last—the availability and stability of a given service is critical. The aggregate system of services is built to allow for change—the system must adapt to the presence of new services that appear a long time after the original services and clients have been deployed, and these must not break functionality.

Service-oriented development is based on the four fundamental tenets that follow:

Boundaries are explicit   A service-oriented application often consists of services that are spread over large geographical distances, multiple trust authorities, and distinct execution environments...Object-oriented programs tend to be deployed as a unit...Service-oriented development departs from object-orientation by assuming that atomic deployment of an application is the exception, not the rule. While individual services are almost always deployed atomically, the aggregate deployment state of the overall system/application rarely stands still.

Services are autonomous   Service-orientation mirrors the real world in that it does not assume the presence of an omniscient or omnipotent oracle that has awareness and control over all parts of a running system.

Services share schema and contract, not class   Object-oriented programming encourages developers to create new abstractions in the form of classes...Services do not deal in types or classes per se; rather, only with machine readable and verifiable descriptions of the legal "ins and outs" the service supports. The emphasis on machine verifiability and validation is important given the inherently distributed nature of how a service-oriented application is developed and deployed.

Service compatibility is determined based on policy   Object-oriented designs often confuse structural compatibility with semantic compatibility. Service-orientation deals with these two axes separately. Structural compatibility is based on contract and schema and can be validated (if not enforced) by machine-based techniques (such as packet-sniffing, validating firewalls). Semantic compatibility is based on explicit statements of capabilities and requirements in the form of policy.

The key thing to note here is that REST is all about performing a limited set of operations on an object (i.e. a resource) while SOA is all about making requests where objects are input and/or output.

To see what this difference means in practice, I again refer to the Wikipedia entry on REST which has the following example

A REST web application requires a different design approach than an RPC application. In RPC, the emphasis is on the diversity of protocol operations, or verbs; for example, an RPC application might define operations such as the following:

getUser()
addUser()
removeUser()
updateUser()
getLocation()
addLocation()
removeLocation()
updateLocation()
listUsers()
listLocations()
findLocation()
findUser()

With REST, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the diversity of resources, or nouns; for example, a REST application might define the following two resource types

 User {}
 Location {}

Each resource would have its own location, such as http://www.example.org/locations/us/ny/new_york_city.xml. Clients work with those resources through the standard HTTP operations, such as GET to download a copy of the resource, PUT to upload a changed copy, or DELETE to remove all representations of that resource. Note how each object has its own URL and can easily be cached, copied, and bookmarked. POST is generally used for actions with side-effects, such as placing a purchase order, or adding some data to a collection.

The problem is that although it is easy to model resources as services as shown in the example in many cases it is quite difficult to model a service as a resource. For example, a service that validates a credit card number can be modeled as a validateCreditCardNumber(string cardNumber) service. On the other hand it is unintuitive how one would model the service as a resource. For this reason I prefer to think about distributed applications in terms of services as opposed to resources.

This doesn't mean I don't think there is value in several aspects of REST. However I don't think it is the right model when thinking about building distributed applications.


 

Categories: XML Web Services

August 20, 2005
@ 11:32 PM
I've posted in the past about not understanding why people continue to use Technorati.com. It seems more people have realized that the service has been in bad shape for months and are moving on. Jason Kottke has a blog post entitled So Long, Technorati where he writes

That's it. I've had it. No more Technorati. I've used the site for, what, a couple of years now to keep track of what people were saying about posts on kottke.org and searching blogs for keywords or current events. During that time, it's been down at least a quarter of the time (although it's been better recently), results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it's slow as molasses.

When it does return results in a timely fashion for links to kottke.org, the results often include old links that I've seen before in the results set, sometimes from months ago. And that's to say nothing of the links Technorati doesn't even display. The "kottke.org" smart list in my newsreader picks up stuff that Technorati never seems to get, and that's only pulling results from the ~200 blogs I read, most of which are not what you'd call obscure. What good is keeping track of 14 million blogs if you're missing 200 well-known ones? (And trackbacks perform even better...this post got 159 trackbacks but only 93 sites linking to it on Technorati.)

Over the past few months, I've been comparing the results from PubSub to those of Technorati and PS is kicking ass. Technorati currently says that 19 sites have linked to me in the past 6 days (and at least four of those are old and/or repeats...one is from last September, fer chrissakes) while PubSub has returned 38 fresh, unrepeated results during that same time. (Not that PubSub is all roses and sunshine either...the overlap between the result sets is surprisingly small.)

While their search of the live web (the site's primary goal) has been desperately in need of a serious overhaul, Technorati has branched out into all sorts of PR-getting endeavors, including soundbiting the DNC on CNN, tags (careful, don't burn yourself on the hot buzzword), and all sorts of XML-ish stuff for developers. Which is all great, but get the fricking search working first! As Jason Fried says, better to build half a product than a half-assed product. I know it's a terrifically hard problem, but Figure. It. Out.

Jason Kottke recommends IceRocket's blog search at the end of his post. I've been using the Bloglines Citations feature for the past couple of months and love it. That in combination with RSS feeds of search results via PubSub have replaced Technorati for all my ego searching needs.


 

Tim Bray has a recent post entitled The Real Problem that opens up the quarterly debate on the biggest usability problem facing XML syndication technologies like RSS and Atom; there is no easy way for end users to discover or subscribe to a website's feed.

Tim writes

One-Click Subscription First of all, most people don’t know about feeds, and most that do don’t subscribe to them. Check out the comments to Dwight Silverman’s What’s Wrong with RSS? (By the way, if there were any doubt that the blogging phenomenon has legs, the fact that so many people read them even without the benefits of RSS should clear that up).

Here’s the truth: an orange “XML” sticker that produces gibberish when you click on it does not win friends and influence people. The notion that the general public is going to grok that you copy the URI and paste it into your feed-reader is just ridiculous.

But, as you may have noticed, the Web has a built-in solution for this. When you click on a link to a picture, it figures out what kind of picture and displays it. When you click on a link to a movie, it pops up your favorite movie player and shows it. When you click on a link to a PDF, you get a PDF viewer.

RSS should work like this; it never has, but it can, and it won’t be very hard. First, you have to twiddle your server so RSS is served up correctly, for example as application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry, the person who runs your web server can do it in five minutes.

Second, you either need to switch to Atom 1.0 or start using <atom:link rel="self"> in RSS. If our thought leaders actually stepped up and started shouting about this, pretty well the whole world could have one-click subscriptions by next summer, using well-established, highly-interoperable, wide-open standards.

As long as people expect one click subscription to depend on websites using the right icons, the right HTML and the right MIME types for their documents it won't become widespread. On the other hand, this debate is about to become moot anyway because every major web browser is going to have a [Subscribe to this website] button on it in a year or so. Firefox already has Live Bookmarks, there's Safari RSS for Mac OS X users and Internet Explorer 7 will have Web Feeds.

As far as I'm concerned, the one click subscription problem has already been solved. I guess that's why Dave Winer is now arguing about what to name the feature across different Web browsers. After all, RSS geeks must always have something to argue about. :)


 

For the few folks that have asked, I have uploaded 50 Photos from my Nigeria Trip to the photo album in my MSN Space. The photos are from all over Nigeria specifically Lagos, Abuja and Abeokuta. They are somewhat crappy since I used a disposable camera I bought at the airport but they do capture the spirit of the vacation.

I guess I should start thinking about investing in a digital camera.

Update: Even though no one asked I've also decided to start rotating a song of the week on my space from the rap group I formed with Big Lo and a couple of other guys back in high school. Just click on the play button on the Windows Media player module to hear this week's track.


 

Categories: Trip Report

August 16, 2005
@ 06:40 PM

Joe Wilcox, an analyst for Jupiter Research, recently posted his changed impressions on MSN Spaces in his blog post Making Room for My Space. He writes

I have started using MSN Spaces as the place where I keep my personal Weblog. Duing 2004 and part of 2005, I used TypePad's blogging service, and more recently moved one of my domains to a bloghoster. While a domain offers great search engine exposure, using the hosted blogging software requires some knowledge of HTML/CSS coding and other techniques; it's more work and trouble than I have time for. TypePad is a good alterative that's fairly easy to use, but it's by no means point and click.

To Microsoft's credit, MSN Spaces is remarkably easy to use, or so I am discovering as I give the service a hard second look. Sure, there were glitches at beta launch, but the service seems solid now. Some established blogger balked at the lack of control, meaning Microsoft tools took most of it, when the service launched as beta. But Microsoft never meant the service for them, but the masses of people that hadn't yet started blogging, and maybe folks like me too busy to become an amateur blogsite designer.

The simplicity and beauty of Microsoft's approach foreshadows possible future product changes competitors and partners shouldn't ignore...MSN Spaces takes that approach, of providing easy tools for doing the most common blogsite tasks. The user doesn't have as much control, but he or she can get the most common tasks quickly done. Over time, Microsoft has increased the amount of control and customization that power users would want, such as Friday's release of three MSN Spaces PowerToys, for layout control, custom (sandbox) modules and Windows Media content.
...
I would encourage Microsoft competitors and partners to closely watch MSN Spaces' progress. Apple blindsided Microsoft with iPod and the iTunes Music Store, a circumstance well understood by Microsoft product managers. Simplicity is one cornerstone of the products' success. Synching iPod to iTunes is no more complicated than connecting the device to the computer. There are settings to do more, but the baseline functionality that is suitable to most users is plug and synch. Microsoft has embarked on a similar, simpler approach with MSN Spaces.

It is interesting seeing how geeks adore complexity in the software and hardware that they use. I can still remember Robert Scoble's complaints about Spaces in his post MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me  or even CmdrTaco's comments when Apple released the iPod, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame". Despite both products being dissed by A-list geeks they have become widely adopted by millions of people.  

More proof that designing for regular people is a lot different from designing for geeks.


 

Categories: MSN

I was recently re-reading Jesse James Garrett's article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications and it struck me that the article was very much an introductory text on building web applications which skirted a number of real world issues. The core idea behind the article is that using DHTML and server callbacks results in web sites that are more responsive [from the end user's perspective] than traditional web applications. This is very true.

However if you are building a large scale web application there is more to consider when using AJAX than how to create a function that hides the differences between the XMLHttpRequest object in IE and Firefox. Problems that have to be solved [or at the very least considered] include

  1. How to abstract away browser detection from each page in the application
  2. How to make the site accessible or at least work on non-Javascript enabled browsers
  3. How to efficiently manage the number of connections to the server created by the client given the "chattiness" of AJAX applications compared to traditional web applications
  4. How to reduce the amount of time spent downloading large script files
  5. How to create permalinks to portions of the application
  6. How to preserve or at least simulate the behavior of the browser's 'Back' button

At MSN we've had to come up with solutions to a number of these problems while working on Start.com, MSN Spaces, the next version of Hotmail, and the next version of MyMSN. We have built our own AJAX framework and come up with a number of best practices for building large scale applications using AJAX. 

Much to my surprise Scott Isaacs (one of the inventors of DHTML and now an architect at MSN) has started a series on the problems that face web sites that plan to utilize AJAX and how we solved them at MSN. The first two articles in the series are Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 1 and Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 2. Scott will also be giving a talk at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) about Start.com and some of the cool AJAX stuff we've done.

I actually expected this would be the kind of information we'd keep close to our chest since they give us a competitive advantage so it is quite a welcome surprise to see us sharing knowledge with the Web developer community this way. I've already started nagging Scott to write a book about this stuff or at least update his Inside Dynamic HTML for the new millenium.


 

Categories: MSN | Web Development

Since leaving the XML team last year I haven't paid much attention to the various betas and CTPs of Visual Studio.NET 2005 that have been made available over the past year. Thus I don't have a position on the article Developers seek third beta release for Visual Studio 2005 from InfoWorld which states

After having been stalled several times already, it would seem that the last thing developers would want for the Visual Studio 2005 toolset is another delay. Nonetheless, a request from some developers for a new beta release would, if granted, potentially hold back the product set yet again.
...
In launching an effort for a third beta release, developers are citing bugs and performance issues with existing prereleases. A suggestion posted on the MSDN Product Feedback Center seeks support for a third beta release of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Team System in late September.

"Push back RTM (release to manufacturing) if you have to," the online suggestion states. "RTM December 31st or push it to 2006 (just keep the 2005 name then, no big deal)."

The release-to-manufacturing date signifies the product’s impending general availability for customers.

"There are still way too many bugs and performance issues. Too many issues get resolved as 'postponed,'" the online request continued. "Developers won't care about when the RTM date was a few months after RTM if the product is full of bugs."

Seventy-two people had voted on the suggestion as of Friday afternoon.

"I would much rather that Microsoft push this release back and get things right," according to one person who commented.

"A Beta 3 is absolutely required," stated another person who signed the petition. "There are so many outstanding bugs and issues that a Beta 3 is required to ensure stability of the final release."

Microsoft released a prepared statement via e-mail Friday noting the planned November 7 release date.

"Microsoft appreciates feedback from all users. For this version of Visual Studio, Microsoft has continually solicited product feedback by issuing multiple betas and Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and encouraging the community to provide feedback via the MSDN Product Feedback Center. The community of 6 million Visual Studio developers and more than 240 Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) have been providing a great deal of valuable feedback and telling Microsoft that they are very excited [about] the November 7 launch."

Interesting feedback. The number of votes on the issue have doubled to about 143 votes as at a few minutes ago when I checked on the issue entitled Suggestion Details: Release .Net 2.0 Beta 3 on the MSDN Product Feedback Center.

Despite how negative this seems, it is great that customers can give such direct feedback to Microsoft product teams in such a transparent manner. The developer division faces a tough challenge if the claims being made by the commenters are valid.  I wish them luck.
 


 

August 15, 2005
@ 06:20 PM

It seems there is an open call for participation for the 2006 edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Although I'm not in right demographic to be an ETech speaker since I don't work at a sexy Silicon Valley startup, I'm not a VP at a major software company and don't consider myself a Friend of O'Reilly, I plan to toss my hat in the ring and send in two talk proposals anyway.

  1. What's Next for RSS, Atom and Content Aggregation: Currently the primary usage of content syndication technology like RSS has been consuming news and blog postings in desktop or web-based RSS readers. However the opportunities created by syndication technologies go much further than enabling us to keep up with Slashdot and Boing Boing in our RSS reader of choice. Podcasting is one manifestation of the new opportunities that arise once the concept of content syndication and aggregation is applied to domains outside of news sites and blogs. This talk will focus problem areas and scenarios oustde of blogs, news sites and traditional RSS readers that can benefit from the application of syndication technologies like RSS and Atom.

  2. Bringing MSN into Web 2.0: The essence of Web 2.0 is moving from a Web consisting of Web pages and Web sites (Web 1.0) to a Web consisting of Web applications based on open data that are built on Web platforms. MSN hosts a number of properties from social software applications like MSN Spaces, Hotmail, MSN Groups and MSN Messenger which are used by hundreds of millions of people to communicate to software that enables people to find information they need such as MSN Search and MSN Virtual Earth. All of these applications. A number of these web sites are making the transition to becoming web platforms; MSN Virtual Earth has a Javascript API, MSN Search exposes search results as RSS feeds and MSN Spaces will support the MetaWeblog API which uses XML-RPC. This talk will focus on the current and future API offerings coming from MSN and give a behind the scenes look as to how some of these APIs came about from conception and getting sign off from the bean counters to technical details on building web services.

These are my first drafts of both proposals, criticisms are welcome. If they don't get accepted, I'll survive. Now that I've actually written the abstracts I can just keep submitting them to various conferences I'm interested in until they get accepted somewhere. In my experience, it usually takes about 2 or 3 submissions to get a talk accepted anyway.


 

Categories: Web Development

August 15, 2005
@ 03:07 AM

The MSN Mobile team dropped two excellent betas last week. The first was http://mobile.spaces.msn.com/ which is mentioned in Mike Torres's post on the Mobile Spaces (Beta) where we learn

you can:

  1. Create a space from a mobile device.  Pocket PCs, Palms, and most popular mobile phones are supported.  Just browse over to http://mobile.spaces.msn.com from your mobile device (or go to http://spaces.msn.com and you will be redirected to the mobile version)
  2. See a list of your contacts' recently updated spaces.  This feature is really useful for a mobile device and great for catching up with people!  Just "click" on a contact to get to their space and start exploring.
  3. Add blog entries, view your archives, email a link to your space, and even change your settings - all from your itty bitty mobile device.
  4. Read and add new comments (my favorite feature!)  You are now able to stay on top of discussions from wherever you happen to be - in school, on a bus, in a meeting, or in line at Starbucks.

The second beta is http://mobile.msn.com/search/ which brings local search to your mobile device. This is mentioned in the blog post Get Local Search with Maps and Directions on your phone!  from the MSN Search blog where we learn

So what does it do? You can search for a restaurant, store, school, dentist, museum – basically, anything listed in the Yellow Pages and White Pages. Just enter your search term (i.e. "coffee" or "Victrola" ) and location (zip code, city/state or full street address) and hit the Search button. Your recently used locations are even stored and easily accessible the next time you use the service. We’ll return the first handful of results, including name, address, distance from your current location and phone number – which you can dial by clicking!  Select the result name and you’ll see a page with more detail, including a color map. Select "get directions" and we’ll provide turn-by-turn driving directions between your starting location and result address (both editable). All of these features have been specially designed to work on your phone, requiring minimal interaction and optimized for speed and ease of use.

The MSN Mobile crewis definitely shipping some good stuff. Props go out to Michael Smuga and the rest of the gang.


 

Categories: MSN